Those persons who are much accustomed to abstract contemplation are
generally unfitted for active pursuits, and _vice versa_. I myself am
sufficiently decided and dogmatical in my opinions, and yet in action
I am as imbecile as a woman or a child. I cannot set about the most
indifferent thing without twenty efforts, and had rather write one of
these Essays than have to seal a letter. In trying to throw a hat or a
book upon a table, I miss it; it just reaches the edge and falls back
again, and instead of doing what I mean to perform, I do what I intend
to avoid. Thought depends on the habitual exercise of the speculative
faculties; action, on the determination of the will. The one assigns
reasons for things, the other puts causes into act. Abraham Tucker
relates of a friend of his, an old special pleader, that once coming out
of his chambers in the Temple with him to take a walk, he hesitated at
the bottom of the stairs which way to go--proposed different directions,
to Charing Cross, to St. Paul's--found some objection to them all, and
at last turned back for want of a casting motive to incline the scale.
Tucker gives this as an instance of professional indecision, or of that
temper of mind which having been long used to weigh the reasons for
things with scrupulous exactness, could not come to any conclusion at
all on the spur of the occasion, or without some grave distinction to
justify its choice. Louvet in his Narrative tells us, that when several
of the Brisotin party were collected at the house of Barbaroux (I think
it was) ready to effect their escape from the power of Robespierre,
one of them going to the window and finding a shower of rain coming on,
seriously advised their stopping till the next morning, for that the
emissaries of government would not think of coming in search of them in
such bad weather. Some of them deliberated on this wise proposal,
and were nearly taken. Such is the effeminacy of the speculative and
philosophical temperament, compared with the promptness and vigour of
the practical! It is on such unequal terms that the refined and romantic
speculators on possible good and evil contend with their strong-nerved,
remorseless adversaries, and we see the result. Reasoners in general
are undecided, wavering, and sceptical, or yield at last to the weakest
motive as most congenial to their feeble habit of soul.(1)
Some men are mere machines. They are put in a go-cart of business, and
are harnessed to a profession--yoked to Fortune's wheels. They plod on,
and succeed. Their affairs conduct them, not they their affairs. All
they have to do is to let things take their course, and not go out of
the beaten road. A man may carry on the business of farming on the same
spot and principle that his ancestors have done for many generations
before him without any extraordinary share of capacity: the proof is, it
is done every day, in every county and parish in the kingdom. All
that is necessary is that he should not pretend to be wiser than his
neighbours. If he has a grain more wit or penetration than they, if his
vanity gets the start of his avarice only half a neck, if he has ever
thought or read anything upon the subject, it will most probably be the
ruin of him. He will turn theoretical or experimental farmer, and
no more need be said. Mr. Cobbett, who is a sufficiently shrewd and
practical man, with an eye also to the main chance, had got some
notions in his head (from Tull's _Husbandry_) about the method of
sowing turnips, to which he would have sacrificed not only his estate at
Botley, but his native county of Hampshire itself, sooner than give up
an inch of his argument. 'Tut! will you baulk a man in the career of
his humour?' Therefore, that a man may not be ruined by his humours, he
should be too dull and phlegmatic to have any: he must have 'no figures
nor no fantasies which busy thought draws in the brains of men.' The
fact is, that the ingenuity or judgment of no one man is equal to that
of the world at large, which is the fruit of the experience and ability
of all mankind. Even where a man is right in a particular notion,
he will be apt to overrate the importance of his discovery, to the
detriment of his affairs. Action requires co-operation, but in general
if you set your face against custom, people will set their faces against
you. They cannot tell whether you are right or wrong, but they know
that you are guilty of a pragmatical assumption of superiority over them
which they do not like. There is no doubt that if a person two hundred
years ago had foreseen and attempted to put in practice the most
approved and successful methods of cultivation now in use, it would
have been a death-blow to his credit and fortune. So that though the
experiments and improvements of private individuals from time to time
gradually go to enrich the public stock of information and reform the
general practice, they are mostly the ruin of the person who makes them,
because he takes a part for the whole, and lays more stress upon the
single point in which he has found others in the wrong than on all the
rest in which they are substantially and prescriptively in the right.
The great requisite, it should appear, then, for the prosperous
management of ordinary business is the want of imagination, or of any
ideas but those of custom and interest on the narrowest scale; and as
the affairs of the world are necessarily carried on by the common run
of its inhabitants, it seems a wise dispensation of Providence that
it should be so. If no one could rent a piece of glebe-land without a
genius for mechanical inventions, or stand behind a counter without
a large benevolence of soul, what would become of the commercial and
agricultural interests of this great (and once flourishing) country?--I
would not be understood as saying that there is not what may be called
a genius for business, an extraordinary capacity for affairs, quickness
and comprehension united, an insight into character, an acquaintance
with a number of particular circumstances, a variety of expedients, a
tact for finding out what will do: I grant all this (in Liverpool and
Manchester they would persuade you that your merchant and manufacturer
is your only gentleman and scholar)--but still, making every allowance
for the difference between the liberal trader and the sneaking
shopkeeper, I doubt whether the most surprising success is to be
accounted for from any such unusual attainments, or whether a man's
making half a million of money is a proof of his capacity for thought
in general. It is much oftener owing to views and wishes bounded but
constantly directed to one particular object. To succeed, a man should
aim only at success. The child of Fortune should resign himself into the
hands of Fortune. A plotting head frequently overreaches itself: a mind
confident of its resources and calculating powers enters on critical
speculations, which in a game depending so much on chance and unforeseen
events, and not entirely on intellectual skill, turn the odds greatly
against any one in the long run. The rule of business is to take what
you can get, and keep what you have got; or an eagerness in seizing
every opportunity that offers for promoting your own interest, and a
plodding, persevering industry in making the most of the advantages
you have already obtained, are the most effectual as well as the safest
ingredients in the composition of the mercantile character. The world
is a book in which the _Chapter of Accidents_ is none of the least
considerable; or it is a machine that must be left, in a great measure,
to turn itself. The most that a worldly-minded man can do is to stand at
the receipt of custom, and be constantly on the lookout for windfalls.
The true devotee in this way waits for the revelations of Fortune as
the poet waits for the inspiration of the Muse, and does not rashly
anticipate her favours. He must be neither capricious nor wilful. I have
known people untrammelled in the ways of business, but with so intense
an apprehension of their own interest, that they would grasp at the
slightest possibility of gain as a certainty, and were led into as many
mistakes by an overgriping, usurious disposition as they could have been
by the most thoughtless extravagance.--We hear a great outcry about the
want of judgment in men of genius. It is not a want of judgment, but an
excess of other things. They err knowingly, and are wilfully blind.
The understanding is out of the question. The profound judgment which
soberer people pique themselves upon is in truth a want of passion and
imagination. Give them an interest in anything, a sudden fancy, a bait
for their favourite foible, and who so besotted as they? Stir their
feelings, and farewell to their prudence! The understanding operates
as a motive to action only in the silence of the passions. I have heard
people of a sanguine temperament reproached with betting according to
their wishes, instead of their opinion who should win; and I have seen
those who reproached them do the very same thing the instant their own
vanity or prejudices are concerned. The most mechanical people, once
thrown off their balance, are the most extravagant and fantastical.
What passion is there so unmeaning and irrational as avarice itself? The
Dutch went mad for tulips, and ---- ---- for love! To return to what was
said a little way back, a question might be started, whether as thought
relates to the whole circumference of things and interests, and business
is confined to a very small part of them, viz. to a knowledge of a man's
own affairs and the making of his own fortune, whether a talent for
the latter will not generally exist in proportion to the narrowness and
grossness of his ideas, nothing drawing his attention out of his own
sphere, or giving him an interest except in those things which he can
realise and bring home to himself in the most undoubted shape? To the
man of business all the world is a fable but the Stock Exchange: to the
money-getter nothing has a real existence that he cannot convert into a
tangible feeling, that he does not recognise as property, that he cannot
'measure with a two-foot rule or count upon ten fingers.' The want
of thought, of imagination, drives the practical man upon immediate
realities: to the poet or philosopher all is real and interesting that
is true or possible, that can reach in its consequences to others, or be
made a subject of curious speculation to himself!
But is it right, then, to judge of action by the quantity of thought
implied in it, any more than it would be to condemn a life of
contemplation for being inactive? Or has not everything a source and
principle of its own, to which we should refer it, and not to the
principles of other things? He who succeeds in any pursuit in which
others fail may be presumed to have qualities of some sort or other
which they are without. If he has not brilliant wit, he may have solid
sense; if he has not subtlety of understanding, he may have energy
and firmness of purpose; if he has only a few advantages, he may have
modesty and prudence to make the most of what he possesses. Propriety is
one great matter in the conduct of life; which, though, like a graceful
carriage of the body, it is neither definable nor striking at first
sight, is the result of finely balanced feelings, and lends a secret
strength and charm to the whole character.
Quicquid agit, quoquo vestigia vertit,
Componit furtim, subsequiturque decor.
There are more ways than one in which the various faculties of the
mind may unfold themselves. Neither words nor ideas reducible to words
constitute the utmost limit of human capacity. Man is not a merely
talking nor a merely reasoning animal. Let us then take him as he is,
instead of 'curtailing him of nature's fair proportions' to suit our
previous notions. Doubtless, there are great characters both in active
and contemplative life. There have been heroes as well as sages,
legislators and founders of religion, historians and able statesmen
and generals, inventors of useful arts and instruments and explorers of
undiscovered countries, as well as writers and readers of books. It
will not do to set all these aside under any fastidious or pedantic
distinction. Comparisons are odious, because they are impertinent, and
lead only to the discovery of defects by making one thing the standard
of another which has no relation to it. If, as some one proposed, we
were to institute an inquiry, 'Which was the greatest man, Milton or
Cromwell, Buonaparte or Rubens?' we should have all the authors and
artists on one side, and all the military men and the whole diplomatic
body on the other, who would set to work with all their might to pull
in pieces the idol of the other party, and the longer the dispute
continued, the more would each grow dissatisfied with his favourite,
though determined to allow no merit to any one else. The mind is not
well competent to take in the full impression of more than one style of
excellence or one extraordinary character at once; contradictory claims
puzzle and stupefy it; and however admirable any individual may be
in himself and unrivalled in his particular way, yet if we try him by
others in a totally opposite class, that is, if we consider not what
he was but what he was not, he will be found to be nothing. We do not
reckon up the excellences on either side, for then these would satisfy
the mind and put an end to the comparison: we have no way of exclusively
setting up our favourite but by running down his supposed rival; and for
the gorgeous hues of Rubens, the lofty conceptions of Milton, the deep
policy and cautious daring of Cromwell, or the dazzling exploits and
fatal ambition of the modern chieftain, the poet is transformed into a
pedant, the artist sinks into a mechanic, the politician turns out no
better than a knave, and the hero is exalted into a madman. It is as
easy to get the start of our antagonist in argument by frivolous and
vexatious objections to one side of the question as it is difficult
to do full and heaped justice to the other. If I am asked which is
the greatest of those who have been the greatest in different ways, I
answer, the one that we happen to be thinking of at the time; for while
that is the case, we can conceive of nothing higher. If there is a
propensity in the vulgar to admire the achievements of personal prowess
or instances of fortunate enterprise too much, it cannot be denied that
those who have to weigh out and dispense the meed of fame in books have
been too much disposed, by a natural bias, to confine all merit and
talent to the productions of the pen, or at least to those works which,
being artificial or abstract representations of things, are transmitted
to posterity, and cried up as models in their kind. This, though
unavoidable, is hardly just. Actions pass away and are forgotten, or are
only discernible in their effects; conquerors, statesmen, and kings live
but by their names stamped on the page of history. Hume says rightly
that more people think about Virgil and Homer (and that continually)
than ever trouble their heads about Caesar or Alexander. In fact, poets
are a longer-lived race than heroes: they breathe more of the air of
immortality. They survive more entire in their thoughts and acts. We
have all that Virgil or Homer did, as much as if we had lived at the
same time with them: we can hold their works in our hands, or lay them
on our pillows, or put them to our lips. Scarcely a trace of what the
others did is left upon the earth, so as to be visible to common eyes.
The one, the dead authors, are living men, still breathing and moving
in their writings. The others, the conquerors of the world, are but the
ashes in an urn. The sympathy (so to speak) between thought and thought
is more intimate and vital than that between thought and action. Though
of admiration to the manes of departed heroism is like burning incense
in a marble monument. Words, ideas, feelings, with the progress of time
harden into substances: things, bodies, actions, moulder away, or melt
into a sound, into thin air!--Yet though the Schoolmen in the Middle
Ages disputed more about the texts of Aristotle than the battle of
Arbela, perhaps Alexander's Generals in his lifetime admired his pupil
as much and liked him better. For not only a man's actions are effaced
and vanish with him; his virtues and generous qualities die with him
also: his intellect only is immortal and bequeathed unimpaired to
posterity. Words are the only things that last for ever.
If, however, the empire of words and general knowledge is more durable
in proportion as it is abstracted and attenuated, it is less immediate
and dazzling: if authors are as good after they are dead as when they
were living, while living they might as well be dead: and moreover with
respect to actual ability, to write a book is not the only proof
of taste, sense, or spirit, as pedants would have us suppose. To do
anything well, to paint a picture, to fight a battle, to make a plough
or a threshing-machine, requires, one would think, as much skill and
judgment as to talk about or write a description of it when done. Words
are universal, intelligible signs, but they are not the only real,
existing things. Did not Julius Caesar show himself as much of a man in
conducting his campaigns as in composing his Commentaries? Or was the
Retreat of the Ten Thousand under Xenophon, or his work of that name,
the most consummate performance? Or would not Lovelace, supposing him to
have existed and to have conceived and executed all his fine stratagems
on the spur of the occasion, have been as clever a fellow as Richardson,
who invented them in cold blood? If to conceive and describe an heroic
character is the height of a literary ambition, we can hardly make it
out that to be and to do all that the wit of man can feign is nothing.
To use means to ends; to set causes in motion; to wield the machine of
society; to subject the wills of others to your own; to manage abler
men than yourself by means of that which is stronger in them than their
wisdom, viz. their weakness and their folly; to calculate the resistance
of ignorance and prejudice to your designs, and by obviating, to turn
them to account; to foresee a long, obscure, and complicated train of
events, of chances and openings of success; to unwind the web of others'
policy and weave your own out of it; to judge of the effects of
things, not in the abstract, but with reference to all their bearings,
ramifications, and impediments; to understand character thoroughly; to
see latent talent or lurking treachery; to know mankind for what they
are, and use them as they deserve; to have a purpose steadily in view,
and to effect it after removing every obstacle; to master others and be
true to yourself,--asks power and knowledge, both nerves and brain.
Such is the sort of talent that that may be shown and that has been
possessed by the great leaders on the stage of the world. To accomplish
great things argues, I imagine, great resolution: to design great things
implies no common mind. Ambition is in some sort genius. Though I would
rather wear out my life in arguing a broad speculative question than in
caballing for the election to a wardmote, or canvassing for votes in
a rotten borough, yet I should think that the loftiest Epicurean
philosopher might descend from his punctilio to identify himself with
the support of a great principle, or to prop a falling state. This
is what the legislators and founders of empire did of old; and the
permanence of their institutions showed the depth of the principles from
which they emanated. A tragic poem is not the worse for acting well:
if it will not bear this test it savours of effeminacy. Well-digested
schemes will stand the touchstone of experience. Great thoughts reduced
to practice become great acts. Again, great acts grow out of great
occasions, and great occasions spring from great principles, working
changes in society, and tearing it up by the roots. But I still conceive
that a genius for actions depends essentially on the strength of the
will rather than on that of the understanding; that the long-headed
calculation of causes and consequences arises from the energy of the
first cause, which is the will setting others in motion and prepared
to anticipate the results; that its sagacity is activity delighting in
meeting difficulties and adventures more than half-way, and its wisdom
courage not to shrink from danger, but to redouble its efforts with
opposition. Its humanity, if it has much, is magnanimity to spare the
vanquished, exulting in power but not prone to mischief, with good sense
enough to be aware of the instability of fortune, and with some regard
to reputation. What may serve as a criterion to try this question by
is the following consideration, that we sometimes find as remarkable
a deficiency of the speculative faculty coupled with great strength of
will and consequent success in active life as we do a want of voluntary
power and total incapacity for business frequently joined to the highest
mental qualifications. In some cases it will happen that 'to be wise
is to be obstinate.' If you are deaf to reason but stick to your own
purposes, you will tire others out, and bring them over to your way of
thinking. Self-will and blind prejudice are the best defence of actual
power and exclusive advantages. The forehead of the late king was not
remarkable for the character of intellect, but the lower part of his
face was expressive of strong passions and fixed resolution. Charles Fox
had an animated, intelligent eye, and brilliant, elastic forehead
(with a nose indicating fine taste), but the lower features were weak,
unsettled, fluctuating, and without _purchase_--it was in them the Whigs
were defeated. What a fine iron binding Buonaparte had round his face,
as if it had been cased in steel! What sensibility about the mouth! What
watchful penetration in the eye! What a smooth, unruffled forehead! Mr.
Pitt, with little sunken eyes, had a high, retreating forehead, and a
nose expressing pride and aspiring self-opinion: it was on that (with
submission) that he suspended the decisions of the House of Commons and
dangled the Opposition as he pleased. Lord Castlereagh is a man rather
deficient than redundant in words and topics. He is not (any more than
St. Augustine was, in the opinion of La Fontaine) so great a wit as
Rabelais, nor is he so great a philosopher as Aristotle; but he has that
in him which is not to be trifled with. He has a noble mask of a face
(not well filled up in the expression, which is relaxed and dormant)
with a fine person and manner. On the strength of these he hazards his
speeches in the House. He has also a knowledge of mankind, and of the
composition of the House. He takes a thrust which he cannot parry on his
shield--is 'all tranquillity and smiles' under a volley of abuse, sees
when to pay a compliment to a wavering antagonist, soothes the melting
mood of his hearers, or gets up a speech full of indignation, and knows
how to bestow his attentions on that great public body, whether he
wheedles or bullies, so as to bring it to compliance. With a long reach
of undefined purposes (the result of a temper too indolent for thought,
too violent for repose) he has equal perseverance and pliancy in
bringing his objects to pass. I would rather be Lord Castlereagh, as far
as a sense of power is concerned (principle is out of the question),
than such a man as Mr. Canning, who is a mere fluent sophist, and never
knows the limit of discretion, or the effect which will be produced by
what he says, except as far as florid common-places may be depended on.
Buonaparte is referred by Mr. Coleridge to the class of active rather
than of intellectual characters; and Cowley has left an invidious but
splendid eulogy on Oliver Cromwell, which sets out on much the same
principle. 'What,' he says, 'can be more extraordinary than that a
person of mean birth, no fortune, no eminent qualities of body, which
have sometimes, or of mind, which have often, raised men to the highest
dignities, should have the courage to attempt, and the happiness to
succeed in, so improbable a design as the destruction of one of the most
ancient and most solidly-founded monarchies upon the earth? That he
should have the power or boldness to put his prince and master to an
open and infamous death; to banish that numerous and strongly-allied
family; to do all this under the name and wages of a Parliament; to
trample upon them too as he pleased, and spurn them out of doors when he
grow weary of them; to raise up a new and unheard-of monster out of
their ashes; to stifle that in the very infancy, and set up himself
above all things that ever were called sovereign in England; to oppress
all his enemies by arms, and all his friends afterwards by artifice; to
serve all parties patiently for a while, and to command them
victoriously at last; to overrun each corner of the three nations, and
overcome with equal facility both the riches of the south and the
poverty of the north; to be feared and courted by all foreign princes,
and adopted a brother to the Gods of the earth; to call together
Parliaments with a word of his pen, and scatter them again with the
breath of his mouth; to be humbly and daily petitioned that he would
please to be hired, at the rate of two millions a year, to be the master
of those who had hired him before to be their servant; to have the
estates and lives of three kingdoms as much at his disposal as was the
little inheritance of his father, and to be as noble and liberal in the
spending of them; and lastly (for there is no end of all the particulars
of his glory), to bequeath all this with one word to his posterity; to
die with peace at home, and triumph abroad; to be buried among kings,
and with more than regal solemnity; and to leave a name behind him, not
to be extinguished but with the whole world; which as it is now too
little for his praises, so might have been too for his conquests, if the
short line of his human life could have been stretched out to the extent
of his immortal designs!'
Cromwell was a bad speaker and a worse writer. Milton wrote his
despatches for him in elegant and erudite Latin; and the pen of the one,
like the sword of the other, was 'sharp and sweet.' We have not that
union in modern times of the heroic and literary character which was
common among the ancients. Julius Caesar and Xenophon recorded their own
acts with equal clearness of style and modesty of temper. The Duke of
Wellington (worse off than Cromwell) is obliged to get Mr. Mudford to
write the History of his Life. Sophocles, AEschylus, and Socrates were
distinguished for their military prowess among their contemporaries,
though now only remembered for what they did in poetry and philosophy.
Cicero and Demosthenes, the two greatest orators of antiquity, appear
to have been cowards: nor does Horace seem to give a very favourable
picture of his martial achievements. But in general there was not that
division in the labours of the mind and body among the Greeks and Romans
that has been introduced among us either by the progress of civilisation
or by a greater slowness and inaptitude of parts. The French, for
instance, appear to unite a number of accomplishments, the literary
character and the man of the world, better than we do. Among us, a
scholar is almost another name for a pedant or a clown: it is not so
with them. Their philosophers and wits went into the world and mingled
in the society of the fair. Of this there needs no other proof than the
spirited print of most of the great names in French literature, to whom
Moliere is reading a comedy in the presence of the celebrated Ninon de
l'Enclos. D'Alembert, one of the first mathematicians of his age, was a
wit, a man of gallantry and letters. With us a learned man is absorbed
in himself and some particular study, and minds nothing else. There is
something ascetic and impracticable in his very constitution, and he
answers to the description of the Monk in Spenser--
From every work he challenged essoin
For contemplation's sake.
Perhaps the superior importance attached to the institutions of
religion, as well as the more abstracted and visionary nature of its
objects, has led (as a general result) to a wider separation between
thought and action in modern times.
Ambition is of a higher and more heroic strain than avarice. Its objects
are nobler, and the means by which it attains its ends less mechanical.
Better be lord of them that riches have,
Than riches have myself, and be their servile slave.
The incentive to ambition is the love of power; the spur to avarice is
either the fear of poverty or a strong desire of self-indulgence. The
amassers of fortunes seem divided into two opposite classes--lean,
penurious-looking mortals, or jolly fellows who are determined to get
possession of, because they want to enjoy, the good things of the wo
others, in the fulness of their persons and the robustness of their
constitutions, seem to bespeak the reversion of a landed estate, rich
acres, fat beeves, a substantial mansion, costly clothing, a chine and
curkey, choice wines, and all other good things consonant to the wants
and full-fed desires of their bodies. Such men charm fortune by the
sleekness of their aspects and the goodly rotundity of their honest
faces, as the others scare away poverty by their wan, meagre looks. The
last starve themselves into riches by care and carking; the first
eat, drink, and sleep their way into the good things of this life. The
greatest number of _warm_ men in the city are good, jolly follows. Look
at Sir William -----. Callipash and callipee are written in his face: he
rolls about his unwieldy bulk in a sea of turtle-soup. How many haunches
of venison does he carry on his back! He is larded with jobs and
contracts: he is stuffed and swelled out with layers of bank-notes
and invitations to dinner! His face hangs out a flag of defiance to
mischance: the roguish twinkle in his eye with which he lures half the
city and beats Alderman ----- hollow, is a smile reflected from heaps
of unsunned gold! Nature and Fortune are not so much at variance as to
differ about this fellow. To enjoy the good the Gods provide us is to
deserve it. Nature meant him for a Knight, Alderman, and City Member;
and Fortune laughed to see the goodly person and prospects of the
man!(2) I am not, from certain early prejudices, much to admire the
ostentatious marks of wealth (there are persons enough to admire them
without me)--but I confess, there is something in the look of the old
banking-houses in Lombard Street, the posterns covered with mud, the
doors opening sullenly and silently, the absence of all pretence, the
darkness and the gloom within, the gleaming of lamps in the day-time,
Like a faint shadow of uncertain light,
that almost realises the poetical conception of the cave of Mammon in
Spenser, where dust and cobwebs concealed the roofs and pillars of solid
gold, and lifts the mind quite off its ordinary hinges. The account
of the manner in which the founder of Guy's Hospital accumulated his
immense wealth has always to me something romantic in it, from the same
force of contrast. He was a little shop-keeper, and out of his savings
bought Bibles and purchased seamen's tickets in Queen Anne's wars,
by which he left a fortune of two hundred thousand pounds. The story
suggests the idea of a magician; nor is there anything in the _Arabian
Nights_ that looks more like a fiction.